Holl Art Institute, Munich c.1985
photograph
Holl Art Institute Collection

Jann Pilka enrolled at the Holl Art Institute in 1962, a controversial choice for art education. One of its senior lecturers, Baldur Von Trott, had served as an engineer in one of the Panzer divisions that entered Paris in 1940. Von Trott encouraged his students to view the event not as a political act but an art gesture - a reassertion of the superiority of mechanisation and industrialism over a Parisian art world that had become "all nonsense and waffles [sic]." Figurative works were discouraged at Holl in favour of abstract techniques and performance art. Von Trott expressed this controversial world view in a presentation to first year students, an art event in which four crates of of French champagne were to be sequentially destroyed by small incendiary charges. However the student in charge of the explosives, Anna Stück, miscalculated the detonation timings and triggered all 48 charges simultaneously. The resulting explosion shattered many of the windows shown here at the front of the building, injuring many of the students and killing a substitute tutor. Pilka later called the incident a satori or "moment of clarity." He struck up a relationship with Anna Stück during their recuperation at a Munich hospital and they remained close until her death in 1968.